Massad Boulos: Like a man calling Libyans to prayer from Malta

When Massad Boulos, the US President’s Senior Advisor for Arab and African Affairs, chooses to meet senior Libyan officials from both East and West Libya in Malta rather than in any Libyan city, he resembles a man calling the faithful to prayer from an island where no one hears the call. Libyans continue to pray to the rhythm of their own cities — Tripoli, Misrata, Benghazi, Sabha — while Boulos raises his voice from Malta, a place that neither expects nor responds to such a summons. The metaphor is not ornamental; it captures the entire political moment. Libya’s crisis cannot be resolved from a Mediterranean balcony. It can only be resolved where Libyans actually live, negotiate, fight, and resist: on Libyan soil.

The choice of Malta is not a logistical detail. It is a political signal — a compressed expression of Washington’s approach to the Libyan conflict. The United States prefers to remain at a safe distance from the core of Libya’s fragmentation, managing its tensions, monitoring its lines, and calibrating its tempo without assuming responsibility for pushing the rival factions toward a real settlement.

The distance between Tripoli and Benghazi today is not merely geographic; it is psychological, political, and rooted in competing interests. Every meeting held outside Libya, especially in a symbolic location like Malta, widens that distance rather than narrowing it.

When Libya’s “rival brothers” gather abroad, they do so as representatives of competing territories and authorities — not as partners in a single state. They return home more convinced that the solution lies elsewhere, waiting for another signal from abroad.

Boulos’s statement describing the Malta meeting as “constructive” reflects the familiar diplomatic vocabulary Washington has used for years: broad phrases about a “unified Libya,” “stability,” and “economic and security partnership,” without touching the core of the crisis or demonstrating any willingness to push Libyan actors toward painful concessions — the kind required to build a single state with unified institutions. The American initiative circulating in political circles, which proposes merging the Government of National Unity with the parliament‑appointed government and forming a new Presidential Council, is not a solution. It is a redesign of the same division, a repackaging that preserves the privileges each faction gained from chaos.

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Seen in this light, the Malta meeting becomes another link in a long chain of external conferences: Berlin three times, Paris twice, Abu Dhabi twice, Geneva three times, and the Moroccan rounds in Skhirat and Bouznika. All carried the banner of a “Libyan solution,” yet all reproduced the crisis because the Libyan participants were unwilling to relinquish the advantages of territorial control, armed power, resource access, and dual legitimacy. The failure was not simply because these meetings were held outside Libya. It was because the “rival brothers” treated them as opportunities to improve their negotiating positions, not as moments to end a division that has made a family owning two homes — one in Tripoli and one in Benghazi — feel as though it lives in two separate countries.

Washington’s current posture, expressed through Boulos, is not a departure from this pattern but an extension of it. The United States is not seeking a final resolution to Libya’s crisis; it is seeking to manage it. A controlled suspension of the conflict prevents a full‑scale collapse while preserving Washington’s ability to influence energy flows, migration routes, and regional balances — without committing itself to the arduous work of state‑building.

Libya, in Washington’s calculus, is not a nation that must be completed. It is a file that must remain open, a lever to be used with Europe, regional powers, and global rivals, including Russia.

This explains why Boulos speaks of “institutional unification” without addressing the essential question: who will pay the price of such unification? Who will surrender authority on the ground? Who will accept becoming part of a state with a single center and a single decision‑making structure? The rumored details of the initiative answer clearly: no one. Merging the two governments under Abdulhamid Al‑Dbeibeh and forming a new Presidential Council headed by Saddam Haftar merely stabilises the duality in a new form. It ensures that Libya remains suspended between East and West, between two governments and two competing projects, while the world is told that an “American solution” is underway.

Mohamed al‑Menfi, head of the Presidential Council, understood this contradiction when he insisted that any political settlement must be inclusive, sustainable, and conducted through direct dialogue among Libya’s official institutions. His position is not a polite diplomatic reservation; it is a recognition that any solution crafted outside Libya, away from its institutions, will be temporary and fragile, reproducing the division in a new guise. Al‑Menfi knows that involving Libya’s institutions is not a procedural demand but the only path to a consensus capable of surviving the pressures of armed groups, financial interests, and regional influence.

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Yet the problem does not lie solely in Washington. It lies equally — and decisively — with Libyans themselves. The solution, if they truly desire it, is in their hands: abandoning the privileges chaos has granted them and accepting that a single state cannot be built on the foundation of two governments or on territories behaving like independent entities. Every external initiative, American or otherwise, will remain trapped in a circular loop unless Libya’s “rival brothers” decide that the era of personal and regional privilege has ended. Continuing these privileges means continuing Libya’s fragmentation and keeping the country open to foreign intervention.

The man calling to prayer in Malta, in the old Arab proverb, exerts effort in vain — raising his voice in a place that neither expects nor responds to the call. Massad Boulos today is calling from Malta, while Libyans pray to the rhythm of their own cities, moving according to the realities of power on the ground, not according to diplomatic statements issued from Washington or a Mediterranean island. Any meeting held in Malta or elsewhere, without addressing the roots of Libya’s division and without compelling Libyan actors to relinquish their privileges, will be nothing more than another episode in a long series of “calls to prayer in Malta” — gestures that change nothing in a country trapped since 2011 in perpetual transition, between two governments, two legitimacies, and two competing visions of a state that has not yet been allowed to exist.

Defending the idea that Boulos cannot — and perhaps Washington does not wish to — resolve the Libyan crisis is not pessimism. It is a political conclusion drawn from a long trajectory of initiatives that never touched the core of the problem.

Until the center of gravity shifts from Malta, Washington, Berlin, and Paris to Tripoli, Benghazi, Misrata, and Sabha — until dialogue moves from hotel rooms abroad to Libya’s own institutions — the man in Malta will continue calling, and Libyans will continue praying in their cities, each to his own call, in a country split into two, waiting for a solution that will never arrive until it is first decided that it must be Libyan before it can be anything else.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.